[Dialogue] 12/20/12, Spong: On Speaking at the Athenaeum in Madrid and A Christmas Letter

Thu Dec 20 07:41:39 PST 2012

     HOMEPAGE        MY PROFILE        ESSAY ARCHIVE       MESSAGE BOARDS       CALENDAR

	On Speaking at the Athenaeum in Madrid
	It was a uniquely Spanish event held in the beautifully ornate Athenaeum in downtown Madrid. It followed the format of a carefully orchestrated, intellectual and cultural pattern. The audience numbered over 300 participants. It began at 7:00 p.m. and lasted until 10:00 p.m. after which we went out to dinner. That was not late night dining in Madrid, where life goes on deep into the night. Restaurants do not open for dinner before 7:30 p.m. The siesta tradition of napping during the heat of the day is still in force. A Westerner thus has to slide the clock forward about two hours in order to adjust to the Spanish lifestyle. Westerners also have to slow both their clocks and the pace of life, for in Madrid nothing we attended in our four days there ever started at the scheduled time. Time does not drive life in Spain.
	This Athenaeum-hosted activity was well advertised. I had been invited to do a public lecture on the subject of homosexuality, as it expresses itself in the public, political and ecclesiastical life of the Western world.” This lecture had three sponsors: first was the Athenaeum itself and especially the philosophical wing of the Athenaeum; second, was the two-year old national lobbying and educational group known as the Federacion Espana por Lesbian, Gay, Transgender and Bi-Sexual people (FELGTB), and third was a national group organized around the work of a French Christian philosopher and mathematician named Marcel Legaut, who sought to do his work outside the structures of institutional Christianity.
	Prior speakers at events at the Athenaeum have included Madame Curie, Mother Teresa, Albert Einstein, Unamuno and Sarah Bernhardt among many others. The Athenaeum imposed its normal format on that evening. I was the person around which all the publicity was focused, but preliminary speakers, prior to my being introduced that evening, included Victoria Caro, the secretary of the philosophy section of the Athenaeum, Philosophy professor and head of the Philosophy division of the Athenaeum, Ilia Galan, a deputy from the National Assembly of the Spanish government and one who is a strong political activist for transgender people, Carla Antonelli; the nationally known attorney for homosexual causes, Manuel Rodenas, and finally Aurelio Lepe Gil, the coordinator of religious affairs for the FELGTB organization, who along with Domingo Malero, who heads up the Legaut group, were the principal architects of my visit. It was the longest preliminary build up and introduction to a lecture that I have ever experienced. The people in the audience, however, were clearly familiar with this format and seemed to be engaged in it. Finally, after about 45 minutes of preliminary speeches and activities, I was introduced and began my formal presentation. Since my Spanish is quite limited, my lecture was translated line by line by two people, one an atheist, Michael Thallium and the other a candidate for ordination in the Metropolitan Community Church, Brian Christinakis.
	The uniqueness of this moment lay in the fact that I was the first bishop from any religious tradition to speak publicly in all of Spain in favor of gay rights, full inclusion of gay and lesbian people and in support of same-sex marriage. Spain’s dominant religious institution is the Roman Catholic Church, but this Church is quite unpopular with the people. The reputation of the Catholic Church has been badly tarnished by two events in Spanish history. One was the Inquisition in the 14th century and the other was the far more recent memory of that Church’s support for General Franco in the Spanish Civil War. There is a bitter memory of that military dictatorship, which was viewed as repressive, inhumane and even destructive to the life of Spain. The negativity toward the Catholic Church is so deep that Spain can best be described as a secular nation, but carrying from its history a deeply Catholic footprint In any event, a bishop dressed in the purple vest of my profession, speaking publicly on behalf of gay rights was a unique and noteworthy event in the Spanish context. The press was particularly intrigued.
	I began the lecture by announcing that the battle for the full inclusion of gay and lesbian people in both church and society has been won and all that remains is for us to live into a new consciousness that this victory has been achieved. I repeated my firm conviction that the moment a society begins to debate one of its cultural prejudices that prejudice begins to die. The reason for this is that all prejudices are rooted in justifying cultural definitions. Once those definitions are successfully challenged by new knowledge, the prejudice is doomed. No reputable psychiatrist today, for example, would define homosexuality as the manifestation of a mental illness and no learned person, scientist or otherwise today still regards homosexuality as a choice that morally depraved people make. Yet those were the two most widely accepted “cultural definitions” of homosexuality until new knowledge demonstrated that neither of these definitions remained defensible and that both were quite simply wrong, embarrassingly wrong. When this new knowledge began to penetrate the previous debate then homophobia was on its way to the museums of antiquity, to take its place beside the witches of Salem, Massachusetts and the once widely assumed abnormality of left-handedness.
	I noted, sadly, that despite this new knowledge the major Western institution where resistance still remains to the new acceptance of homosexual persons as minority but not abnormal, is the Christian Church in both its Catholic and Protestant forms. The leadership of the Catholic Church, which continues to operate out of the completely discredited definition articulated by Pope Benedict XVI that homosexuality is “deviant,” has become almost hysterical in recent days in its negativity, even using the threat of excommunication to enforce its dying prejudice. Protestants, especially those in the evangelical, fundamentalist traditions, see the movement toward the acceptance of homosexual persons as a direct assault on the authority of the Bible, which they are quite certain condemns homosexuality as “sinful.” So in my address, I looked first at the large numbers of homosexual men who have served well in both the past and the present in the Catholic priesthood, about whom they have never been honest. Then I cited the historical record of that church, which has regularly been wrong on social issues, ranging from its condemnation of Galileo and Darwin to its attempt to change the left-handedness of children in parochial schools, and its refusal until recently to allow suicide victims to be buried from the church. In these examples new truth became self-evident long before the hierarchy of that church recognized that they were wrong and finally changed their attitude. I assured my audience that the same thing will ultimately occur in regard to the issue of homosexuality.
	Next I spoke to the Bible concerns of Protestantism, going one by one through the battles of history in which Christians quoted the Bible on the wrong side of great moral issues. The literal Bible was the Church’s ally in the battle against the Magna Carta and in favor of the divine right of kings. The Bible was quoted by the Christian Church to justify the institution of slavery and later to enable segregation and apartheid, slavery’s bastard step-children, to become established. The Bible was quoted by the male establishment in both church and state to oppress the legitimate claims of women and to keep them in positions of social, political and economic servility. So when the Literal-minded Christians quote the Bible today to condemn homosexual people, it has the quality of being the last gasp of a dying mentality. Such a use of the Bible also depends on biblical ignorance being rampant.
	To illustrate that I went through the nine specific biblical texts that are regularly used by Bible-quoting Christians to oppose homosexuality and to pronounce it to be condemned by God. Each one can be quickly and competently set aside in the light of contemporary biblical scholarship. Who among us, for example, is ready to use the story of Sodom and Gomorrah as a biblical text to condemn homosexual persons, when in that story the incest of Lot with his two daughters does not disturb his designation as a “righteous man?” Who among us will give credibility to Paul’s strange argument that homosexuality is God’s punishment inflicted on those human beings who do not worship God properly? To quote the literal words of the Bible, which was written between two and three thousands years ago to condemn homosexual people today, is hardly a rational procedure.
	I concluded this lecture by turning to the gospels, in which homosexuality is never once mentioned, to show that the portrait of Jesus drawn from gospel sources makes it clear that he was always on the side of the victims of prejudice and rejection. One has only to look at the way Jesus related to and treated such people as the lepers, the Samaritans, the Gentiles, the woman with the chronic menstrual flow and women in general, who were yearning for equality. The lecture was well, even enthusiastically, received and I spent the next sixty minutes responding to questions from the audience as people processed new thoughts.
	Accounts of my time in Madrid were widely reported the next day in the papers not just in Spain, but across Latin America. At an earlier press conference when the questions were concluded, I stepped down from the stage and, as I always do, I went over to my wife, Christine, and kissed her. For me there was nothing unusual about this, but it seems that the reporters found it noteworthy. In every account that I read they mentioned that the “bishop kissed his wife on the lips at the end of the press conference.” Perhaps if they knew more bishops who had wives that they love as much as I love Christine, this single act would not have received worldwide notice. Consciousness, however, is raised in all kinds of ways. As one of my Episcopal predecessors in the office of bishop noted, as he stood before a massive and beautiful Roman Catholic cathedral, “Well, they do have better quarters, but we have better halves.” To which I say “Viva!”

	~John Shelby Spong

	Read the essay online here.

	A CHRISTMAS LETTER TO MY READERS:

	Dear Friends,
	The images of this past weekend collide in my brain this holiday season in a violent and cacophonous way.  I have the mental picture of children, six and seven years of age, piled up in the corner of a school room riddled with bullets from a civilian version of the M-16 rifle used by our armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.  No child in this mental picture received less than three bullets, some of them received as many as eleven.  In the pile of carnage with them were their teachers.  Down the hall were the bullet riddled bodies of their principal and their guidance counselor.  Twenty children, twelve girls, eight boys, and six adults, all women, the youngest 27, the oldest 56, were dead.

	On Sunday I was in my parish church, St. Peter’s in Morristown, New Jersey for worship.  It was pageant Sunday and the church was filled with children costumed as angels, shepherds, wise men and even as lambs, donkeys, cows and camels walking on four legs.  King Herod, who was about seven with his crown in place, directed our attention to Bethlehem.  Then we heard the familiar story of the presence of God being experienced in the life of a helpless baby, a dependent child.  We listened to the narrative in which the “Holy” was found in the vulnerability of an infant, who was subjected to the dangers of human existence.  Our gifted rector, Janet Broderick, spoke to the children about their fears, the pain that life inflicts.  She did not hand out panaceas or cheap grace.  She did not seek to dull the pain we were feeling with rosy pictures of heavenly bliss now being enjoyed by the victims, nor did she delude us with the idea that twenty-six new stars are now shining in the sky.  Instead she let us feel the trauma of the Newtown shooting, the human situation where no one is ever completely safe and the fact that we must embrace and live with these exigencies of human existence.   Her message was not “God will take care of you,” for clearly God did not take care of these Connecticut children, but rather that God is with you, God is in you, so have courage, live life fully each day, love wastefully, to all that each of us can be and make every moment count as if it is part of eternity.

	I looked at the faces of those children in my church last Sunday.  They had embraced the horror of the Newtown shooting.  Yet, they set it aside momentarily to bask in the glow of knowing that they were performing and were appreciated and loved by their audience.  Every parent, however, held his or her child a bit more tightly, a little longer than usual, and much more poignantly.  I looked around at the faces of those in that congregation that I know so well.  I saw a number of people who had recently lost their spouses.  They were both elderly and young.  They were black and white.  Their losses were six months ago, three months ago, three weeks ago.  I looked at the faces of parents with whom I have walked when they lost their children to sickness, to accidents, or to the violence of the natural world.

	In that congregation on Sunday we prayed not for the security that life will never possess, but for an enlarged capacity to live, a greater ability to love.  We prayed not for the absence of pain and hurt, but to be enabled to share in a peace that transcends pain and hurt, the peace that passes understanding.  It is not peace “as the world gives.”

	I then went over in my mind the arguments heard so often in America’s political gun law debates.  “To limit a citizen’s access to own legally any sort of weapon is an infringement on their freedom.”  Twenty-six people in a single school in Connecticut have had their freedom dramatically ended by a legally owned weapon!  “The constitution guarantees us the right to bear arms.”  Does that constitutional guarantee allow anyone the right to bear assault weapons?  “The reason guns need to have an expanded magazine for rapid firing is that in target practice it takes too long to reload after every shot.”  Does that minor inconvenience override the worth of a single child whose life is snuffed out by a barrage of fire power designed to stop an advancing army?  How long will we continue to allow the paranoia of a few to endanger the lives of the many?  Can this nation, which was born in a new world with a frontier that had to be tamed, get over the gun obsession that we have incorporated into our national psyche and ever grow up to recognize that the frontier is not there any longer, but that we have become a large interdependent society of diverse people, where all of us must temper our individual desires for the sake of the well-being of the whole?  We do that in thousands of ways already.  We drive on the right side of the street, we stop on red and go on green, we have rules about who can drive and we take licenses away when the privilege of driving has been violated.  Is it too much to think that we must ban once and for all the personal ownership and use of weapons designed for mass murder, prosecute those who sell or possess arms illegally and close the loopholes that now exist in background checks for all gun owners? When does a person’s right to carry fire arms conflict with another person’s right to live without fear of violence?

	As the Christmas season is celebrated, we see the smiles on our children’s faces, but we also remember those bullet-filled bodies in Connecticut.  We hear the message of peace on earth, but we also remember to the shame in our unwillingness to act politically to make our children safe.  It is not just our children, we need to recognize that we also did not make safe Representative Gabby Gifford of Arizona, nor did we make safe our own political leaders like John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, George Wallace and Malcolm X.  Do we want to be a society where children are at risk and where political debate is decided with the use of guns?  Is that responsible citizenship?  Is that a faithful way to be followers of the one we call the Prince of Peace?

	A blessed Christmas to you all.

	~John Shelby Spong

	IN MEMORIAM

	Charlotte Brown, 6  
	Grace McDonnell, 7
	Daniel Barden, 7  
	Ann Marie Murphy, 52
	Rachel Davino, 29  
	Emilie Parker, 6
	Olivia Engle, 6   
	Jack Pinto, 6
	Josephine Gay, 7  
	Noah Pozner, 6
	Ana Marques-Greene, 6  
	Caroline Previdi, 6
	Dylan Hockley, 6  
	Jessica Rekos, 6
	Dawn Hochsprung, 47 
	Avielle Richman, 6
	Madeleine Hsu, 6  
	Lauren Rousseau, 30
	Catherine Hubbard, 6  
	Mary Sherlach, 56
	Chase Kowalski   
	Victoria Soto, 27
	Nancy Lanza, 52   
	Benjamin Wheeler, 6
	Jesse Lewis, 6   
	Allison Wyatt, 6
	James Mattioli, 6

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